Parenthetical

First, a signal-boost for my friend Tahnan‘s brilliant idea: I pledge to donate $10 to a safe drinking water charity for every day of Boston’s boil-water order. Will you join me, with whatever you can afford? The reservoir water coming out of my tap right now is a) clear and tasty, b) far safer than [...]

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After the discussion of trilogies (and Martini-Corona’s eternal John Christopher obsession), I decided this project wouldn’t be complete without a Tripod book. The Tripod trilogy (…heh) might have been the first major YA science fiction trilogy, and is certainly a classic. If you somehow missed these books, the premise is that aliens invade, in giant [...]

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Apocalypse how? Aliens. The Clordians didn’t want to compete with humans for habitable planets to colonize, so they wiped us out. The Clordian Sweep “rapid[ly] disintegrat[ed]… all carbon compounds, which destroyed all life.” (Not to mention all paper records of knowledge, all wooden structures… the thoroughness of this destruction is impressive.) Some people, plants, and [...]

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Sorry it’s been awhile. Fortunately the 7th grade trip to New York was not apocalyptic in the slightest. Anyway, speaking of New York, it’s the setting of today’s old-school apocalypse! In the future, everyone lives in vast suburban Tracts in little boxes made of ticky-tacky. All Cities have been evacuated and sealed, deemed too filthy [...]

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In Children of Morrow, we meet Tia and Rabbit, slightly deformed (and oh P.S. telepathic) outcast children in a post-apocalyptic village. The primitive village grew out of a military base, worships a dead nuclear warhead, is patriarchal to a degree that would make Margaret Atwood blush at the crass obviousness of it all, and generally [...]

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A group of bad-ass teen criminals get kicked off Earth to be the lead team of colonizers of the planet Klydor. If they die, eh, no harm done. If they survive, ColSec — Colonization Section, part of the massive government that runs Earth — shows up to claim a nicely broken-in planet. There are giant [...]

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All Amy knows is the endless corridors and grimy roach-infested apartments of the city. She’s marked as a possible troublemaker because she knows how to read, but if she keeps her head down and makes enough deliberate mistakes on the school vids, maybe they’ll send her to a training dorm to learn a trade. Until [...]

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I don’t have time to read and review enough old-school apocalypse books to fill up a whole month, so please enjoy some pre-apocalyptic technology: Window Farms: “hydroponic edible gardens for urban windows” After peak oil, when the large-scale food distribution system breaks down, we can dig a bunch of plastic water bottles out of the [...]

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This is the precursor to popular recent books like The Adoration of Jenna Fox and the Skinned trilogy. Attractive, athletic Eva is in a coma after a horrible car accident. To save her, her parents agree to an experimental treatment: re-growing her mind in the body of a chimpanzee. In Jenna Fox and Skinned, the [...]

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Last month I wrote a lot about apocalypses and dystopias, a perennial favorite topic here in Parenthetical-land. Those posts, and Presenting Lenore’s Dystopian February, inspired my own theme month: Welcome to Old-School Apocalypse April! I’ve been re-reading some childhood favorites from my YA Apocalypse Bookshelf (yes, I really have such a thing). Some hold up [...]

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